I've wanted to try Podman for a couple years. But I keep bowing out because there are no official Ubuntu builds that I could find. Upstream seems content with that status quo.
That's their prerogative, and I could build it myself, but it makes me concerned they don't really have multi-distro compatibility as a priority, which makes me hesitant to commit time to experimenting with it when Docker considers Ubuntu a first-class citizen.
Podman doesn't produce their own binary distributions for ANY Linux distro. The only binary packages they provide are for Mac and Windows because those don't have a native package repository.
Even if they did release their own Linux packages, bear in mind that Podman development is driven by and sponsored almost entirely by Red Hat. It's not really in their interest to pay their developers to maintain packages for Ubuntu, a direct competitor in the enterprise Linux space.
Also yes, podman v4 on bookwarm was famously useless in many cases and because of either libc or kernel (iirc) you could not even install v5 effortlessly.
I like Debian and I like podman but putting this as a usefule nice experience (up until trixie released) is just weird framing.
That's their prerogative, and I could build it myself, but it makes me concerned they don't really have multi-distro compatibility as a priority, which makes me hesitant to commit time to experimenting with it when Docker considers Ubuntu a first-class citizen.